Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)

Amazon I know I started this little blog-thing-experiment to log the movies I've seen this year, but I decided (despite the misleading URL) to log books as well. Since I've read this book and seen the movie quite recently, I'll compare the two instead. Cold Mountain the book and Cold Mountain the movie are like the little angel and devil on your shoulders. Both look just like you, but underneath their intents are completely different. The book uses a love story as an excuse to tell Civil War Stories. The movie uses the Civil War as an excuse to tell a love story. Problem being, the love story is not one to rate among the ages. It's a love story of only the impression of love each character carries with them, and not the toothy, solid love you can pop your corn to. It's wistful and intellectualized love, used by each character for their own purposes. When Ada and Inman finally face each other in the book, they are wondering how the reality of the other might sure up to the pathways they've so deeply cut through their neurons. When their little-devil-mirrors face each other in the movie, there is no intention behind their eyes other then to fulfill the Emotional Cinema 101 plot-point guide. You know what’s going to happen. The book's Odyssean journey away from the underworld of the war is seething with mud, meat (bruised, pierced, shot and rotted) and murder. It’s coated with lust (blood and body), lord and labor. It has a lead-metal tang and an aching-muscle doggedness that chill. The cruelty of life and cruelty of spirit imposed on every character give an arc to their story—a digging from the hole of war to the hill of peace. The movie looks pretty when it shows gore, but it never truly grits up. Dirty faces don’t make dirty souls. But, specifically, let me list a few particular things I disliked about the movie in comparison to the book (even given my understanding of how much a story need be changed for the shift in medium. Also—potential spoilers ahead—ye been warned). 1. Foremost—the movie imposed race into the story. This may sound odd for a story about the civil war, but one of the things about the book that made it interesting was Inmans (and, frankly, all the characters) non-feelings about race. They were Southerners fighting to keep slavery, but it wasn’t their cause. Inman wasn’t a slave owner (or pro-slave), but he was certainly no abolitionist. Ada’s father, who owned slaves in the movie, was a non-Baptist, non-traditional (read: liberal) preacher in the Deep South. It would be likely (although subtextual) that he would be gently leading his flock towards a more healthy view on race relations. But the movie made Ada and Inman modern liberals by putting them in positions where they had to defend or show kindness to slaves. This makes the war their war, when the harsh reality of the book is that they were involved in a fight that had little to do with them except for its overwhelming imposition into their lives. 2. Tegue. Oh man, what a mess. They lost an opportunity and gained horrible formula by making this man and his deputies the sneering, snarling bad guys. The acrobatic-albino sharpshooter was a laughably ridiculous character, and his very existence and actions early in the movie completely undermined the reason for his actions (and negated the tension it created) at the end. Plus, giving Tegue an interest in Ada’s land was trying to create tension while losing the tension that the original story created. It was the Franco-American Italian food of screenwriting. What they did with Sally Strangler and family was the cinematic equivalent of the modern-primitives dance/sex scene in the second Matrix. Talk about unnecessary. 3. They shouldn’t have shown the battle at the beginning. It was a great Civil War re-enactment in the wrong movie. In the book, his wounds drive him home. His disgust with warring drives him home. In the movie, Ada drives him home. What matters the battle? It was gratuitous. At the very least, they should have shown this in flashback only. By starting with text on the screen and showing enemy characters before anybody else, the viewer is put in the position of dispassionate observer. They could have hooked you right away with close emotional ties to Inman if you had been close to his gory, bloody neck and the flies infesting it in the hospital to begin with. 4. Stobrod's music. In the book, Stobrod finding his voice is a metaphor for his own transformation. The moment where he first plays for the soldier who doesn't want to hear one of his few tunes (which I have no argument with how they handled in the movie--crossing Stobrod with Inman early on) hints at the melancholy and strangely original voice he discovers. By shoving old moutain standards on him later in the story, they undermine the character who finally found his voice after a lifetime of searching. Some of the most endearingly lyrical passages in the book were of describing Stobrod's powerful music. Too bad they didn't even really attempt in the movie. I'll bet T-Bone would have been up for the task. All that said, the acting was just fine. Of note is Phillips Seymour Hoffman (always spot on), Natalie Portman, who really shone in her role, and surprisingly good is Renee Zellweger who had no control over the stupid changes they made to her character, so cannot be faulted for literacy (when in the book the beauty of the relationship between Eda and Ruby is that Ada is all books and no street and Ruby is all street and no books). Which is not to say that Nicole and Jude were poor—they were quite good. But they could have been great if, say, Michael Winterbottom had directed it ala The Claim. Anthony Minghella did a disservice to the text when the adaptation could have easily become Apocalypse Now for the Civil War set. Like poet Heather McHugh says: using a synthesizer to imitate a violin is a waste of an opportunity. Where we saw it: Book | We deign to rate it: 87 outta 100
Posted by Martin at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)